Spiritual guru Asaram Bapu was among those to offer his advice. In one of his lectures to disciples, he said that the victim, who died of injuries sustained in the attack, could have “chanted a prayer, taken one of her attackers by the hand, and called him ‘brother,’” to prevent a sexual assault.

Last week the guru was in the news again, this time after police began investigating an allegation by a teenage girl that she had been sexually assaulted by the 75-year-old while visiting the spiritual leader with her parents in the city of Jodhpur, in the western state of Rajasthan. Police say they plan to question the guru on Friday and have issued a notice to him to appear at a station staffed by women.

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“The allegation is that he made obscene gestures and inappropriate sexual advances and overtures, and asked for sexual favors,” said Jodhpur police commissioner Biju George Joseph. “Now we have to get his version.”

The teenager, who the police say is 15, and her family couldn’t be reached for comment.

According to a report in the weekly The Sunday Guardian, the incident happened on August 15, and the teenager told her family about it two days later. They then traveled to New Delhi to confront the guru, who was holding an event in the capital, but were unable to do so and proceeded to file a police complaint to police in Delhi, The Sunday Guardian report said.

The Delhi police transferred the complaint on August 22 to the city of Jodhpur, according to Mr. Joseph, the Jodhpur police commissioner. Mr. Asaram, who goes by only one name, couldn’t be reached directly for comment.

His spokesman, Sunil Wankhede, couldn’t immediately comment as he was in a meeting. But a statement issued by Mr. Wankhede said that the allegations were the result of a conspiracy to defame Mr. Asaram, who uses the honorific Bapu, meaning “father.”

In an interview with a cable news channel made available on the official website of the guru’s organization, Mr. Asaram said that these were “dirty” allegations and that they were without foundation.

The guru also questioned why the teenager’s complaint was only reported to the police days after the alleged incident. When the news anchor commented that the girl was underage and so might be hesitant to report an assault, Mr. Asaram said that the complainant was in her final year of high school. “She’s not a very small girl and she’s a very sharp girl,” the guru said.

Mr. Asaram’s organization runs some 370 ashrams – or spiritual homes – in different parts of the country, some of which provide education to young people. Mr. Asaram’s mission is the moral upliftment of society, according to his website.

Among the things he blames for social degeneration, Mr. Asaram is critical of fraternization between young men and women. On Feb. 14 this year, Mr. Asaram urged his disciples to eschew Valentine’s Day romantic outings and pay tribute to their parents instead.

In addition to his other comments about the December rape, Mr. Asaram also said that if the young woman had had a guru and chanted special prayers regularly, it would not have occurred to her to go on an outing to a movie with a young man, a spokeswoman for the guru told The Wall Street Journal earlier this year. The young woman was attacked on a bus as she headed home from a movie that she had attended with a male friend.

Although his comments about the rape led to criticism from many quarters, Mr. Asaram’s views disapproving of increased socializing among young men and women are not by any means fringe views in India.

In the wake of the rape of a young photojournalist in Mumbai last week, the police chief of that city also appeared to suggest that permissive attitudes to dating and sex were making women more unsafe. He did not explain how the two phenomena were linked.

“I’m asking whether on the one hand you want that couples should be allowed to kiss in the public, on the roads, they should they be allowed to indulge in all kinds of obscene kind of things?” said Mumbai police commissioner Satyapal Singh on news channel NDTV. “On the one hand you want to have this kind of a promiscuous culture and on the other hand you want to a very, very safe and secure environment for the women.”

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